About 50 Rugters students staged a sit-in protest, storming an adminsitration building, over the school inviting Condoleeza Rice to be there commencement speaker this year. They also, along with some liberal professors signed a petition to have Rice disinvited. What is particularly disturbing is that the school's faculty council voted to have her invitation rescinded. They cited "Condoleezza Rice ... played a prominent role in (the Bush) administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction," according to the resolution. Students called her a war criminal and human rights violater.

Their reasoning seems purely political. While it can not be debated that we did not find weapons of mass destruction In Iraq, intelligence agencies all over the world, as well as the prior Clinton Administratrion believed they were there in 2003. Many other democrats also spoke of the dangers of Saddam Hussein and his chemical weapons arsenal.

Here is a quote from William Cohen, Bill Clinton's secratary of defense, from April 2003:I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons…I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out.”You can find quotes from many others quotes here.

In spite of this, some on the left claim their was a deliberate attempt to mislead the american people into thinking that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Many other people believe otherwise. Some even believe that they may have had wmd in 2003 but were able to get rid of them before we could find them. Furthermore it's a documented fact that WMD were in Iraq at one point, and their is documented evidence that Saddam Huissein murdered his own people with chemical weapons. The pictures you see are from an attack on March 16, 1988 on the Kurds living in northern Iraq. For more graphic images . For evidenceIf you are going to believe that Condoleeza Rice deliberately mislead the American people than you have to believe these people did as well, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. I am sure the faculty council would not have disinvited them or any other democrat. In fact when Bill Clinton was president he bombed Iraq and had this to say:"Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors." - Read more

The school's president, Robert Barchi, supported and defended the decision to invite Rice saying that we must be tolerant of those we may disagree with.It's very common for liberals at universities to protest, sometimes very agressively, conservatives coming to speak at colleges. Many do not believe those with opposing views have a right to be heard. Dr. Ben Carson, a brain surgeon, was disinvited by John Hopkins University, after he criticized president Obama at a dinner that Carson spoke at with president Obama sitting right next to him. Condoleeza Rice has also had run into problems in several instances when speaking at other universities. So far I am unaware of of any similar problems that Bill or Hillary Clinton have had and they surely wouldn't have had them if they wanted to speak at Rutgers.Therefore the only reasonable conclusion we can draw is that the faculty council and the student protesters are behaving in a purely partisan (or simply ignorant) manner that is extremely irresponsible, anti-free speech and unbecoming as part of a University that is supposed promote diversity of ideas and thinking. Hopefully the good people at Rugters will let them know they should be ashamed of themselves.